Obituaries

Hazard remembered as writer and mentor

James Hazard was a kid from the oil refinery town of Whiting, Ind., who grew up to be a poet and journalist and helped launch the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's creative writing program.

He taught for 39 years at the university, and many of his former students say his friendly style of teaching and his way of encouraging them will never be forgotten.

His wife of 38 years, fellow Milwaukee poet and UWM professor Susan Firer, said Hazard collapsed in the street March 2 on N. Oakland Ave. in Shorewood. Hazard, of Whitefish Bay, had just strapped his grandson Jack, 4, in the car.

She said Hazard, who was 76, died of cardiac arrest.

There are many stories to tell about Hazard's life. Firer immediately remembered one she said captured the kind of man he was.

It was in 1999. Hazard and his son, Bix, were in Minneapolis to visit the Metrodome. They spotted a man, cigarette in his mouth, bent over the engine of his car. They were about a block away from the man when they heard screaming. The man had somehow set himself on fire.

"Almost everybody ran away," Firer said. "Jim ran toward him. That was the kind of person he was. He was so generous with his time."

Martin Jack Rosenblum, a professor of music at UWM, said Hazard was the most important poet in the Midwest.

"He spoke with a regional voice about universal matters," Rosenblum said. "Reading his poetry was the same as having a conversation with him. That was the strength of his writing."

Gennie Nord, a writer from Tripoli, Wis., who met Hazard years ago at UWM, said he "saved my life."

"I was flailing around in Milwaukee," she said. "I had suffered from depression for so many years. The first time I took his class, it didn't work out. Years later, I did it again and it clicked. Jim took me under his wing and he started encouraging me. It changed my life."

As a journalist, starting in the 1980s, Hazard wrote most frequently in Milwaukee Magazine, with subjects ranging from out-of-the-way Milwaukee bars and restaurants, to a story about his own temporary bout of amnesia, to Milwaukee's drug courts.

His numerous books included "Fire in Whiting, Indiana" and "New Year's Eve in Whiting, Indiana." One memorable poem in the latter volume, "Whiskey in Whiting, Indiana," tells of watching a group of men - probably his bricklayer grandfather and friends - drinking shots in a bar and discussing prizefighters they'd known, and the boy wanting to be a fighter himself, only to have them discourage him: "Jesus, not you, Jimmie."

The poem concludes with the boy standing in front of a mirror, pretending to be a fighter, knocking down shots of Pepsi as the men did and seeing himself "defying them by loving what they loved,/ fighting my way into their dream/ of themselves and out of their dream for me."

Hazard loved the Chicago White Sox and jazz. He played the cornet in bands and named his son after the great jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke.

Hazard earned a bachelor's degree at Northwestern University and a master's from the University of Connecticut and taught for a time at UW-Oshkosh and in Indiana.

In addition to creative writing, he taught many literature classes in UWM's English department. His last course, taught over the winter term, centered on the writings and life of Langston Hughes.

Hazard also taught at the university's summer College for Kids, as well as at the Jewish Day School and as a Poet-in-the-Schools around the state.

Besides his wife, Hazard is survived by their children, Bix Firer, Caitlin Firer and Erin Hazard; three children from previous marriages, Cael Hazard, Jennifer Hazard and Dylan Hazard Woods-Weisman; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. He is also survived by a brother, Timothy Hazard, and sister, Elizabeth Kania.

Firer said her husband's body would be cremated. She said she planned to keep most of the ashes. A small portion, she said, would go elsewhere.

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